Scraps

Collections of thoughts

[words-on-a-tightrope]

Hunger Games Relevance

(Please read/boost if you’ve ever read/watched the hunger games or you care about what’s going on)

I don’t know if other people feel the same way but especially with the new hunger games film coming out I’ve been absolutely floored by some of the parallels between the world in the series and the current conflict in Palestine.

Firstly, Suzanne Collins did say that she partially got the idea from flicking between channels showing reality TV interspersed with footage from the Iraq war so I guess there’s a good reason for me to be seeing similarities now.

But the fact it’s being live-streamed - the carnage - the propaganda - the fact that lots of us have been following the same few (often very young) journalists who have become the ‘face’ of Palestinian resistance (because right now journalism IS resistance being actively targeted by Israel) - it’s all crazy familiar.

I saw a clip of Israeli’s sitting on a hill watching and laughing at the bombs dropping on Gaza today as though they were fireworks just minutes before Israel bombed the 3rd floor of a paediatric hospital. The same ‘Sderot Cinema’ where Israeli’s bought deck chairs and snacks to ‘watch the spectacle’ of the 2014 bombing campaign on Gaza.

The way not everyone in the capitol was evil or bad and some people actively supported the districts but realistically they were still complicit in the exploitation - even if just through ignorance.

The incredible amount of children dying - the bombing of hospitals and withholding of resources (like in District 8 in Mockingjay), the taking of people not involved in Hamas into administrative detention (hundreds arrested in the West Bank - like how the victors were taken in Catching Fire even the ones who weren’t involved in the rebellion), the collective punishment of Gaza (the firebombing of District 12).

The way Israel dropped pamphlets from the sky to tell Gazans to evacuate south and then bombed the route (literally straight out of the games I swear - the video of the pamphlets falling was like the scene with the parachutes in Mockingjay which represent hope and then detonate).

It’s so eerily similar and I just wonder how so many watched those films and read those books and are silent now - why could they identify resistance and oppression and desperation and exploitation in fiction and not reality?

And I wonder if maybe it’s because we have to remind ourselves that we aren’t Katniss in this situation - we aren’t the heroes - we are the Capitol and District citizens watching it all happen on our screens - and that’s an unfortunate and uncomfortable concept to grapple with.

[weird--fxckin--bee]

So Tumblr blocked reblogs on this post... you know, like cowards.

[words-on-a-tightrope]

Information is power. Critical thinking is armour. For young people who don’t have much power, our minds and our voices are our weapons against oppression.

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I hate my gravestone already

it might say my name

the length of my life

daughter, sister, one day maybe wife

the roles I played to other people

I hate that a stranger in 100 years will not look at it and know anything about me

I would like them to know me a little

I want it to read

her favourite colour was red and she loved raspberries

she walked fast and wore silver jewellery and liked rainy days the best

and she hummed in the mornings and sang to the stars and sometimes fell in and out of love in a single night

and if my grave said that I don’t think it would even need my name

because I think that future stranger would know me better

and I think I’d be a little immortal

[words-on-a-tightrope]

A Request

Sometimes I feel like a ghost, you see - so be gentle with your words but not with your hands

please speak to me softly and kiss me hard

hold me by my throat when you whisper sweet things in my ear

grab my hips so roughly you leave bruises, so I can feel you properly, so I can feel like I’m real

[words-on-a-tightrope]

Madonna/Whore Complex and Body Count

I’ve figured out what bothers me about that stupid question.

‘What’s your body count?’

I keep seeing videos of it, asked in the streets, in clubs, on podcasts, and even though it really shouldn’t bother me because I don’t think that type of thing really matters at all, it does.

And it’s not because of what any number means, but because of what people take from it. And it comes down to the Madonna-Whore complex, which is one of the most frustrating and demeaning pillars of misogyny.

If a man asks you what your body count is, he’s asking because he wants to know where you rank on his arbitrary scale between Madonna and Whore. He wants to know based on his judgement of what a ‘good’ number is whether you deserve to be treated like a queen or a slut. Whether you deserve to be cherished or degraded. Whether you’re pure or dirty or somewhere in between.

He wants to know where the line is, what boundaries he can push, and it wouldn’t be his fault because you’re the one who put yourself in that category. It’s a way to make misogyny into a statistic, to justify it with numbers, to draw a line between women who should be protected and women who deserve to hurt.

Just some thoughts - but remember that the scale is arbitrary, and it takes the human out a person. You’re not a number, you’re not defined by your purity or how you’ve chosen to use your body, you aren’t a doll or an idol or a toy or a plaything.

Don’t let someone bring you down with their justifications for their own twisted morals.

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I wish my heart broke a little prettier for you

I wish it broke with a single tear dropping onto red lips

Artfully smudged eyeliner and missed hair

I wish I had laughed sadly when people talked about you, looking down into my wine

That I looked like some tragic figure of romance

Smoking a cigarette against the wall of my apartment building

Smiling sadly when people ask if I’ve ever been in love

Instead it broke messily

With nights drunken exhilaration and wild laughter that ended with bruised knees on a dirty club bathroom

With stops and starts and crushing numbness and more crushing flashes of hope

With outbursts at strangers and takeaway meals that piled up by my bin

I can see you bruising under my eyes

I pray to gods I don’t believe in for you to change your mind

Was I ever enough? Was I just a mirror for your light? Because right now I feel like half a person, and maybe without you I’m just a footnote without any context

Maybe you sucked whatever life I had out of me and left when I was empty

I hope so

I hope I’ll get it back

I wish I broke prettier but I broke like a mess

So I’ll make another wish

The last wish I’ll waste on us

I wish that one day you run into me, lonely and miserable and with the years scrawled onto your face

And you see me like some ghost or some god

Bright and vital and in love

On the arm of one of those boys you always mocked because you were jealous

And you look at me and I look straight through you, brow creasing slightly like I know you from somewhere but I can’t quite place where

And you realise that you’re nothing

And that you barely register as a sad little footnote in someone else’s story

[words-on-a-tightrope]

people as the four humours

phlegmatic: sunlight on a still lake, faded jeans, dog-eared notebooks, comfort films, wide smiles, buttered popcorn, warm blankets crowded on an unmade bed, hands linked by little fingers, smiley faces on torn up bits of paper, daydreams on the second-to-back seats of the bus at 4pm

choleric: sharp eyeliner and sharper words, lighting in the summer, black coffee and half a cigarette, lipstick kisses and mascara tears, the seductive allure of a stranger’s smile, angry words written and never sent, a cold mask for a breaking heart, you see yourself in the night sky but do not know whether your kinship is with the endless darkness or the lonely star that mars it

melancholic: warm tea and comfortable silence, soft eyes, messy hair, ink-stained hands, the sound of rain, a heart traced onto a fogged up windscreen, yellow clothes on the days where the sun seems to have left forever, waking up to tear-stained sheets and feeling a little bit lighter, hopscotch in puddles, love at first sight, nostalgia for the dreams of some beautiful future that you doubt will ever come

sanguine: gold rings and lopsided smirks, half-finished paintings, naps on the beach with your throat to the sun, the surprised burst of laughter that cracks a silence wide open, easy promises, broken hearts, lazy smiles at pretty girls, pretty lies to pretty boys, a type of light that makes people wonder if maybe you’re the sun and maybe we all just orbit you

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I have a million empty notebooks filled with you

[words-on-a-tightrope]

Religion is nothing to do with faith

Religion is nothing to do with love

love and faith go hand in hand

faith is seeing the night sky and know it is vast and beautiful and truly believe that our souls will one day live amongst the stars

feeling the sun on your eyelashes as they link their hand in yours and feeling that overwhelming feeling of yes, of right, of forever

speaking words into the empty air and knowing they are heard

feeling their heartbeat against the skin of your throat and knowing there is something intangible linking more than just your bodies, something more, something holy

Religion is none of that

Religion is about sex

Religion is about power

Religion is knowing the precipice and fearing the void

begging for anything to take the crushing emptiness that comes with feeling weak and vulnerable and like nothing at all

being willing to do anything to look at the night sky and not see oblivion, to feel the sun on your skin without feeling like the soft warmth is a warning, a precedence to being burnt alive

will you save me? will you help me? will you be the things that are missing?

will you let me get on my knees for you? can I worship at your altar? can I feel your hand on my bowed head? let me submit to you entirely

it isn’t so dirty to have bruised knees and that desperate obsession when it’s holy

when that old man with the crucifix necklace who calls a grown woman child, tells her that it’s holy

when that old man in the black gown says he is a mouthpiece of the lord, tells a child that it is holy

power and sex and wrong and right and kneel for me

submit

submit

submit

love and faith have nothing to do with religion

[words-on-a-tightrope]

tell me a lie

be honest

because facts can be so misleading

if you lie and tell me you like yellow and couples who match outfits

I know you hate how some people are so free in their joy, how it feels like they throw it in your face

if you lie and tell me you like long walks on the beach

I will know you feel trapped when things seem too calm

I will know you would rather have your heart face than beat a steady pace

if you lie and tell me you don’t believe in love

I will know that you are a romantic half-disillusioned into a cynic

I will know you would never say ‘I believe in love’ because the lie is easier to admit

I will know you are like me

[words-on-a-tightrope]

who am I?

because to my mother I am the sweet girl who smiled wide at strangers and liked dressing in her clothes and could never quite tame my hair

to my father I am the stubborn girl who would argue when he told me know and hardened when he shouted but softened when he played my favourite songs on his guitar

to my kindergarten teacher I was creative and bold

to my high school religion teacher I was difficult and inflammatory

to one friend I am a voice of reason, I am a candle in the dark

to another I am a bad influence, wild and dark and laughing widely while mascara tears drip down my face

to one stranger I am the girl in pink holding a box of cookies at the train station and humming to a song he can’t quite hear

to another I am the girl who is put together in crisp black and tight smiles

to another I am a woman who smiles at her as I walk by and waves at her little boy

to another I am aloof and cold, and act like I’m better than he is when I refuse that drink

to another I am breathless and soft beneath his touches

who am I?

because everyone knows a different version of me and I cannot work out which is real

so I go over the little pieces and try and work it out - my favourite colour is red, I like talking to the stars, I love hard and break my own heart by hurting people before they hurt me

I like fresh raspberries and rainstorms and bookstores and neon lights

I like it when the sun kisses my throat and I always blow a kiss to the moon

and I think that if I am anyone, I am the sun of those things

so when I die, instead of my name and:

Daughter. Friend. Wife.

I want my tombstone to read:

She was sweet and stubborn and a million different people, and she liked the rain and the stars and the colour red

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I am a book

a leather journal age-softened and filled with all my broken and beating parts

when you find me what will you do?

will you grow frustrated that there is a person hidden between what you wish were empty pages?

will you read me once and throw me aside?

will you love me for a while, and then get bored and move to the next? Will you think about me absently in the years that follow?

will you decide the cover doesn’t strike your interest, and move along without ever touching the paper within?

will you decide that I am yours, and rip out my pages so nobody else find read me whole?

will you whisper your secrets back into my spine? A truth for a truth?

will you write in my margins?

will you brush off the dust?

will you let yourself be lost in me a while?

I am a book, and my content does not change, but with every person who reads me

reveres me

ruins me

my spine bends, my pages rustles, my cover softens from hard or gentle fingerprints

I am forever changed in the smallest ways

I am a book

will you read me?

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I am a romantic

not in this modern sense of goodnight texts

roses and chocolate wrapped in silky ribbons

but in the sense that I watch a storm rage and wish to dance beneath it

I look at the stars and want to swim in them

I raise my face to the sun and smile as it kisses my throat

I am not a romantic

in that I am waiting for a man to shower me with affection and lie me down in silky sheets

and make love slow and sweet

I think there is a romance in messy kisses under neon lights

secrets whispered to strangers after desperate fumbles in dark corners

there is a wild and broken romance

in watching the light cast an old man on the bus stop into art

in smiling at people through coffee shop windows just to steal their own

in letting someone know the gasps you make when they touch your body before they know your name

there is a sad and lovely romance

in tracing pattens on fogged windows and finding wonder in forgotten things

I am a romantic

in the way an artist is a romantic

I am a romantic

and it breaks my heart and makes me whole

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I want to touch the sun

I want the stars to rain down

I want to fall off the edge of the world

I want him

I want so many impossible things

[words-on-a-tightrope]

When I feel sad

When I feel like I am not enough

I draw eyeliner like knives along my eyelids

I paint my lips red

I stand by the mirror and I look at the girl in the glass, I look at the stranger with fire in her gaze and her tears tucked away in the corners of her eyes

I tell her she is beautiful

I tell her she could burn down the world if she wanted, her tears turning to steam in the heat of her fury

I tell her she doesn’t need anyone else, because nobody else really knows her

I tell her she is enough

But after a while, the girl in the mirror is just me again

And she just wants to hear it from someone who isn’t trapped inside her mind, trying to hold together the pieces of her fractured heart

I can only love myself so much

Before the words I speak to the girl in the mirror

All sound like lies

[words-on-a-tightrope]

What do I want?

I wanna fall in love

I wanna fall asleep on the floor amongst my paints and papers

I want my heart to break again so I remember it’s not worth it

I wanna do a heap of drugs and pass out on the pavement

[words-on-a-tightrope]

I like the way my name sounds when you whisper it against my lips